The impact of heterogeneous investments on the evolution of cooperation in public goods game with exclusion

Abstract

Public goods game as a multi-player social dilemma game plays an important role in studying the emergence of cooperation, which remains an open question. This paper studies the impact of heterogeneous investments on cooperative behavior in public goods game, where players adopting exclusion strategy can exclude defectors from the group. Our research shows that the heterogeneous investment mechanism can significantly promote cooperation. When the cost of exclusion is low, the excluders can obtain higher payoff than other players, which leads that cooperators and excluders coexist and dominate the population. As the cost of exclusion increases, the advantage of excluders weakens and population keeps high cooperation level in some regions of contribution rate ω. For low or middle values of r, the too small or relatively large values of ω will be not beneficial to the evolution of cooperation. For high values of r, a small increase in ω will be beneficial to the evolution of cooperation. This paper provides a new understanding of cooperation under heterogeneous investment mechanism.